Think Blogging: Show Recent Comments With Blogger

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Unlike Wordpress and Movabletype, Blogger does not offer her users the ability to have "Recent Comments" columns on their blogs. My buddy Dewei, shared a work around solution with me a while ago. The main idea is to publish all comments from a main blog, to a comments blog, automatically using Blogger's comments notification service, Blogger's mobile blogging feature, and RSS feeds. Tried it and it works, so here is the step-by-step.

1. Create another BlogSpot blog to hold the comments. I shall call this blog the "comments blog."

2. At your main blog, go to Settings, Comments, scroll down. At the "Comments Notification Address" field, enter in an e-mail address to hold comments notification. E.g. your-comments-email@gmail.com

3. At your comments blog, go to Settings, Email. At the "Mail-to-Blogger Address" field, enter in a string of characters which only you have access to. Also, check on "Publish." E.g. thinkblogging.something-secretive@blogger.com

4. Set up your comments email account, forward emails from your-comments-email@gmail.com to the comments blog at thinkblogging.something-secretive@blogger.com.

This automatically publishes the new comments on the comments blog. To configure the email forwarding, catch emails from noreply-comment@blogger.com, with [Your Blog Title] in the subject. I catch [Think Blogging] in my email subject.

5. Use freely available Javascripts to parse the RSS feed from the comments blog, on to your main blog. There you have it, your own "Recent Comments" column!

Post Note: We can't directly forward our comments notification to the comments blog, and publish it without forwarding it first to our email, because Blogger does not allow comments notification to be sent to blogger.com emails.

Ran up with any problems? Can we help?

Tags: recent comments, blogger mod, blogger hack, blogger plugins, blog & weblog.